Bisous Baby

There comes a point in every assistant’s life when they must ask themselves, is it really worth all that extra money to sacrifice part of my holiday to a stage linguistique?

At the beginning of the year, sometime during your introductory meeting with the regional organisers of the assistantship, you will be informed about the possibility of running a stage linguistique. The idea behind this is that children who are less well-off and who therefore cannot spend their holidays abroad still get an opportunity to spend time in an (in this case) English-speaking environment. It’s up to the assistant to choose what kind of activities to do with the students, but it’s supposed to be enjoyable as well as instructive (here at the forefront of advances in education, we call this ‘edu-tainment’). The overly keen (usually those who are training to become real proper teachers) will take up this offer straight away, and choose to run a ‘stage’ at their school during the first holidays, just one month into the contract. Others, such as myself, recoil in fear and disgust at the idea of doing any extra work. We are here because it’s the easiest way to spend a year in France. We’re just coming along for the ride.

The problem only begins if someone actually asks you to run a stage. The deputy head of my school came to me one day asking if I would run a nine-hour stage spread over three days for just five or six students. Anyone who knows me is aware that I have a problem with the word ‘no’, and so of course I agreed.

By the end of the week the number of students had risen to sixteen, meaning that I would have to do two sessions a day, with eight students in each group. Since there would have to be two groups the deputy head told me I would only take each group for two hours a day, meaning that I would only be doing 3 hours more work in total than was originally planned. Okay, not a problem.

But then old Monsieur le Recteur, head of the education office for all of Nantes and the surrounding towns and cities, gets to hear about the stage, and expresses an interest in coming to see it in action.

So from doing nine hours of work with five students I’ve gone to doing eighteen hours with sixteen students, with a visit from the chief of the local education authority thrown in for good measure. I’m telling myself that it will all be fine, because these kids must be really enthusiastic about English: they’ve chosen to enrol for the class, after all. The final blow comes during the first few minutes of the first session, when two of the boys announce to me and the other students that they don’t want to be there at all, their parents forced them to come as a punishment for bad grades. Fabulous.

But as the hours unrolled, things went better than I could have imagined. The students spoke excellently for Monsieur le Recteur and I felt genuinely proud when I could see them improving from day to day. The greatest feeling was when I read the evaluation forms they had to fill in at the end of the sessions and saw the only complaint was that the course only lasted three days. Just occasionally, teaching really is worth the effort.